There are no points to belabor about Russia’s now full scale invasion of the Ukraine, because there are just too many to make sense of any of it. From the Ukraine perspective, at “best” Vladimir Putin intends to turn the country into a defenseless puppet like Belarus; remember that the Crimean invasion was a response to the impeachment of Russia-puppet president Viktor Yanukovych, who angered many with his “promise” to essentially hand over the Crimea to the Russians to base its Black Sea fleet, and was a thoroughly corrupt authoritarian who left the country in near financial ruin with his subservience to Putin and personal greed.
If Putin himself has any personal “credibility” left, it is that we can take as “credible” the worst things we can think of him. He has not merely revealed, but has confirmed, that he is an international thug attacking a country that was no threat to his own or to anyone else’s. Remember that almost right up to the last moment before sending “peace-keeping” troops into two separatist regions where Russia has been supplying arms to rebels for at least eight years at the cost of 16,000 lives, Putin was claiming the military build-up on Ukraine’s borders was a “military exercise” and even as late as last week was claiming that some units were returning to their bases—and on top of that continued to claim it had no plans to invade the Ukraine.
Thus nothing that Putin says should be taken at face value unless the “threat” at its tail end is taken as what he actually intends to do, like it or not. Ukrainians' rightly claim that current sanctions will have no real deterrent effect on Putin’s action, and that the most powerful economic weapon at the West’s disposal (short of a full-on boycott of Russian goods and services), the SWIFT international payments system, appears to be running with weak knees. Sanctions against Russia can’t merely “hurt,” they have to hurt badly enough to change Putin’s behavior, and that obviously has not happened yet.
And they won’t hurt if China has anything to say about it. Because of its refusal to condemn the Russian invasion and its de facto support of it by providing Russia with economic and financial aid to offset the impact of sanctions while still making absurd claims about the usefulness of already pointless “dialogue,” China needs to be sanctioned in some way as well. The U.S. should at least limit the Chinese national presence in this country—both economically and access to technology—to the same limitations that Americans face in China; if China just kicks out all American businesses in response, then the U.S. should respond in kind as much as feasible. If it needs to, it can support the economies of other “low-cost” countries to provide the same goods China does.
One could argue that the West should have submitted to Russian blackmail and simply put in writing that Ukraine was off the NATO membership list to avoid all of this, and that would have given Putin a face-saving “out” of the situation who put himself in, which he either had to act or appear to be a saber-rattling buffoon. But then again, this power mad sociopath could have simply said that the “exercise” was over and made another less-that-subtle threat about what would be in store for the Ukraine if it did consider NATO membership, which wasn’t even in the “pipeline” at all to begin with, and was just used as a propaganda tool by Putin.
And speaking of propaganda, can there be anything more disgusting than Putin’s claim that he is fighting a “denazification” campaign in the Ukraine, which no one outside of Russia believes? Putin’s revisionist history ignores centuries old Ukrainian nationalism and periods of unrest seeking Ukrainian independence. His revisionist history forgets the Holodomor, what Ukrainians called the famine-induced genocide of nearly 4 million Ukrainians and the deporting of many others during the disastrous collectivization of Ukrainian agriculture that was made deliberately worse by Stalin to kill any Ukrainian independence movement. It is no wonder that many Ukrainians initially welcomed the German Army as “liberators” in World War II, only to become openly hostile when the Nazi intentions toward them became more clear.
As I have pointed out recently, Putin has been playing by the Nazi playbook in setting the table for this invasion. Putin has a gruesome, murderous history of engaging in “false flag” operations, such as the one to justify the war in Chechnya; add to that the jailing or assassination of political and media opponents as well as dissidents and anti-corruption whistleblowers—and now the arrest of anti-war protesters—those who loath to see Putin operating on the same plane as Hitler or even Stalin only look like blind fools.
Can we imagine
one moment if we put someone like Donald Trump through a time machine and
landed him in the middle of Nazi Germany, where morality and ethics did not
exist, and the laws and court system codified death as a sentence for “crimes”
that countries that regarded themselves as “civilized” would simply see as the
right to privacy and freedom of speech? Trump’s character lacks empathy,
demands total loyalty, seeks to cause harm to his perceived "enemies," thrives on the cult of personality, employs white
nationalist and racist dog whistles, and utilizes propaganda techniques to twist
misinformation and conspiracies into a “reality” that is shoe-horned into the
paranoid fantasies of supporters and those who want “cover” for their own
sociopathic tendencies. That's right, give someone like Trump power in a place like Nazi Germany and see what happens. Remember that Trump, when asked about the many murders of Putin's political and media opponents, just shrugged it off as something "everybody" does.
But while someone like Trump has a Goering-like personality and the radicalized “populist” appeal of a Hitler, Putin is all-in with the latter—or at least Stalin, as he has demonstrated in his most recent demented speeches justifying his actions. Why is it so hard to imagine what a sociopath like Putin would do in the “right” situation when he has already done so much to recall past Russian glad-handing with the Nazi regime, which allowed Germany to occupy most of continental Europe while giving Stalin the opportunity to absorb the Baltic States—which Putin may yet be planning to do so again, only deterred for the moment by the fact that they are members of NATO?
Just because sociopaths like Trump (when he was president) and Putin are not operating in conditions that would give them the freedom to act on their worst impulses without any restrictions, they are still sociopaths who are capable of repeating the mistakes of the past that apparently are too far in the past for most people to remember what was “wrong” with them. Those mistakes are being repeated here and abroad, and if Putin and his allies are to be stopped, sanctions against them—China included—actually have to “hurt.” If that means jail time for Trump, then this country and the world at least will be the better for it.
By the way, we can’t allow people in this country to forget what the Nazis were all about. Today I was sitting on the bus absorbed in my own business when I became aware that a white male was talking in an agitated manner to the black bus driver, apparently expecting to receive empathy for his complaint, which included the words “Jobs,” “illegal” and “Hispanics.” 50 million Hispanics in this country are U.S. citizens, and there is no doubt in my mind that this is a distinction without a difference in the mind of bigots who need scapegoats to explain their pathetic lives. I called out, loud enough for the rest of the bus to hear, “Oh shut up, you damn Nazi!” which surprisingly actually did cause the man to shut up, because he at least understood the social meaning of the word. He went to a seat before almost immediately getting up and telling the driver he didn’t feel “comfortable” on this bus, being trailed by me loudly telling him to “get off the damn bus” and “damn Trump Nazis.”
The only other response to this was by a Hispanic woman, who appeared to be of indigenous extraction, who turn around with a look of wonderment, as if she didn’t know that in this country you can actually confront racists like that without being arrested or killed—like you might, say, in Putin’s Russia,
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